 Okay, we're back here, live at HP Discover 2012. We are back inside theCUBE SiliconANGLE.tv, the exclusive, extensive coverage of the conference and HP's event here. We're getting down to the wire, last day for us, and I'm joined with my co-host. I'm Dave Vellante at Wikibon.org, and we're here with Bethany Mayer, who is the Senior Vice President and General Manager of HP's networking group, Bethany. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. Good to see you. You know, I hate to say it, this is really the one we've been looking for. We've been going non-stop all week, and you are a wrap-up segment. We're very excited about having you on. It was really exciting. I was trying to bring our energy in our A-game, but since we've been here three days, but thanks for coming on, and so give us the update. You're the GM of the networking division. You were also, prior to that, running marketing for all of ESSN, which is under Dave Donatelli, which is now the Convergent Infrastructure team. Give us the update on what's happening with networking, and we want to get into some of the factoids around software-defined networking, virtualization, all the advancements that's going to scale up, the big data. Yeah, happy to do it. So we made an announcement very recently at Interop, and we also repeated the message, again, at Discover to make sure our customers had heard about it. So we recently launched a new technology called Virtual Application Network, and the idea there is to have the ability to separate the control of your network from the physical network itself, and essentially virtualize the network and provide programmability in the network using Virtual Application Network. It's a module of our Intelligent Management Center, and we have also partnered with F5, which is also integrated into our van manager, our van node, and that allows you to do three really important things. It allows you to characterize the applications that are running on the network. It allows you to virtualize the network, and it allows you to orchestrate or program that network so that you can deploy applications very, very quickly. So when you say characterize them, you mean so that you can inject policies and automate the whole process. That's right, so different applications require different things of the network as they're running across them. I'll give you a good example exchange. It has a protocol called MAPI, it's very, very chatty, and you have to set up your network, your infrastructure, so that you can handle the chattiness, the back and forth of exchange to make sure you don't bog anything else down. And so what we've done along with F5, which of course is the market leading application delivery controller company, is to basically provide that application characterization to in our Intelligent Management Center so that we have the ability to characterize any number of applications, whether it's video, whether it's voice, whether it's exchange, whether it's SAP, any number of applications link as another one, so several different applications that you can basically characterize and then we provide a template that automatically provisions the network appropriately for that application. So in the case of exchange, you can abstract the chattiness and hide that complexity from the user. Right, the really valuable thing about this is it allows you to deploy applications very, very quickly. So right now applications take anywhere from weeks to months to provision, configure your network for, and then deploy. That has a lot to do with the fact that today, unfortunately, the network is very manually managed. The CLI is used very heavily and right now in order to provision a network for a new application, it takes you in a normal data center, it takes you 250,000 CLI entries. So the first the time for that, that means going box by box, putting CLI entries into those switches. It would be sad too if you happen to make a mistake which about one in 1,000 entries are a mistake and then you have to redo it based on the mistake. So it just takes you a really long time to provision the network and it doesn't know what's running on top of it, right? So it isn't characterized for that application. Yeah, so we talk a lot about the IT labor problem on theCUBE and if you look at it, probably about two thirds of the dollars that are getting spent in IT are spent on people. Exactly. And process around them and we think, IT, you think automation, but we've sort of not lived up to that promise, converged infrastructure is a big step at that and some of the things you're talking about with eliminating the command line interface flows or a big step in that direction. I mean, customers must be really pushing you to solve that problem because it's constricting innovation, isn't it? It is. I mean, frankly, the network is far behind in terms of innovation. The CLI itself has to be more than 25 years old. I mean, it's the creation of DAC, believe it or not, from years and years ago. So we're using today, in 2012, what was created in maybe 1983. I mean, just unbelievable time period for using CLIs and that has a lot to do with how the network's been developed and sort of the lack of competitive folks in the networking industry. Everybody's standardized on using a CLI and it's just, it's really manual. It's really error-prone and it takes a lot of time and people to do that. So the payback for having automation is huge. You know, it's like, when there was innovation, it's always like, it's a ratchet game. This gets better, that gets better. You get the servers are cranking out under your guys' group over there, converging infrastructure. Storage has got some great solutions with flash memory, everything's happening. And then it's like, come on, network guys, what's going on? So outside of just the manual, kind of old dated techniques, performance is also an issue too, right? So you talk about as the GM, you've got to look over and manage the P&L, make money, expand the product line. Brandon, you're unique because you have a converging infrastructure team behind you, not just a pure networking company. But what's happening in the trend line? What is the key things going on that's going to change that? Well, I would say first the software defined networking, which Van is our first step into that. In addition to the fact that we have OpenFlow enabled a majority of our products in the portfolio and my commitment is that we'll have OpenFlow enabled the entirety of our switching product line by the end of this year. So that first is very important because again, back to that automation, we provide something that's very differentiated. And I believe that software defined networking is going to be a sea change event for the network because it's really needed. So obviously there's been a lot of startups that have come out of that area. Yes. And depending on who you talk, there's a lot of fud going around the fear and certainly a doubt around what this is. Some are calling it academic. It is new because it popped out of Stanford and some academic guys helped with that. You guys actually- Is it really re-helped by the way? So you guys have just for the record a shipping product of OpenFlow? That is correct. We have the probably the first commercially shipping product of OpenFlow in terms of switches in the market. And we also have an installed base of OpenFlow enabled networks in the market too. What is the promise of OpenFlow on the software side? Is it, what's going to come out of the OpenFlow? Well, the promise of OpenFlow. OpenFlow is just part of how to create a software defined network. So the ability to automate and program the network without having to, as I said, run from box to box to box, that is a very different instantiation. So for software defined networking, the big keys are programmability, virtualization, and automation. So if we can do those three things very well, software defined network is going to really change how networking is done. And we think, I think, as well as my team with NHP believe that OpenFlow is a good part of that. It's an open standard, which not everybody likes, but we like, that's our philosophy. It's an open standard. You can build on that from a controller perspective to create your own products with all the different flavors. But it really allows for interoperability, which is important to our customers. They want products to be interoperable and they want heterogeneity, which we've always talked about with converged infrastructure. HP has had a big emphasis on the cloud, the security and trust in the cloud. How does virtualizing the network, this initiative that you're talking about, change the security model? It actually helps it a lot, because frankly you have a single point of control for your network. So you don't have people changing box configurations out in some part of the data center or in another campus or whatever that could affect the entirety of the infrastructure and cause it to basically be, your network to be taken down. You can have a single control point. That control point can include security as well. So you can authenticate, you can authorize. The complete AAA is there for you and you basically have a more secure network because you don't have folks working in different places to change the network without your knowledge. And presumably it's easier to automate updates and management of patches and things like that. Bethany, I wonder if we could change gears a little bit and talk about your business. You took over, what, now about a year ago? And so definitely firmly have your hands on the wheel. How's business? Maybe give us an update. You guys announced the quarter recently. Yeah, so we grew this quarter and that was great for us. In fact, that's now the ninth consecutive quarter of growth for HP Networking since we acquired 3Com and integrated the companies together. Which is like three years ago now, right? Actually, 2010. April 2010 was when we closed that. So maybe it filled us three years ago, but it's really only two years ago. But in any case, so we continue to see growth in our business, which I'm very pleased about. We continue to see customer momentum. We have some wonderful customers. One that's here today. I think you talked to him as Jason Cohen. Oh, he was great on the Cube. Yeah, he's awesome. Dynamic and innovative. Yeah, tremendous. And again, it's customers like that that really make me enjoy my job, actually, because it's a pleasure to work with them. So we have strong customer momentum, continued customer momentum, and we have great innovation. I mean, in addition to the virtual application network that I talked about, we also just launched more higher density, higher performance line cards for the 10 500. So now we have a 48 port 10 gig line card for the 10 500 and we have a four port 40 gig line card as well for the 10 500. So lots of density, lots of performance and throughput for the campus that has heavy video traffic, heavy rich media services required. And so we continue to innovate, which I, you know, that's why I do my job. Yeah, the product line's rounding out now. Dave Donatelli talked about it in his keynote and he gave some comparisons with your main competitor. He loves that. And he admittedly said, you know, this is their last generation product, but I'm using that comparison because that's what you're going to be migrating from. So it was at least transparent about that unlike your friends at Oracle who never are. So I respect that, you know. So Bethany, talk about even a lot of news lately, LinkedIn and then eHarmony had a hack and some security breaches. Security's a huge challenge. You guys have leadership there. Talk about what's going on with security and your vision there. Well, so as you know, I mean, we have market leading security products. We have tipping point, which is the market leader again, consistently for intrusion prevention and intrusion detection. We also have ArcSight, which is a great product that basically allows you to analyze and see everything that's going on in your infrastructure and we are working with our ArcSight team to be more integrated with using our management platform and the ArcSight analytics integrating that technology together so you can really, not only, you know, manage your network, deploy switches automatically, but also, you know, see what's going on and make sure that your network is secured. And then of course, Fortify, which is our offering to go through code and make sure that the code is written securely. So all of those things, you know, really provide a nice layered security portfolio for a customer, right? You make sure the code that you're developing is clean. You make sure that the network doesn't have any back doors, any problems that might, you know, come in and intrude. And the other pieces, you can see everything. You can see if there are security breaches or incidents that might, you know, lead you to believe someone's trying to hack your network. So I think we have a great offering. We continue to innovate there and again, continue to build customer momentum. We have a lot of developers, application developers in our network and in our SiliconANGLE audience. They're not really infrastructure geeks. What would you say to the folks out there that are watching that, that kind of know some innovations going down there? They worry about vulnerabilities because obviously, the apps is where there's a lot of holes in the apps too, but where is the hardened point you guys from a security standpoint? How do you guys talk to app developers? You say, hey, take, we're good. Take it from here. Because there's more apps coming onto the marketplace every day that need that programmatic QOS and or policy. Right, so the Fortify product in particular really allows companies when they have developers working on applications to be able to test the application code itself to determine whether that code has been written so that no one could perhaps, you know, get into the code base. And that's actually really important for developers as well because they want to make sure they develop clean code. They also want to make sure that the network that they're writing over is very secure and honestly our IPS product is better than anything on the market. And we have customers that absolutely are the most demanding customers from a security perspective in terms of their infrastructure that you could imagine. So we think that from a developer perspective, we offer really strong support for them in the code base itself and we offer strong support for them on the network when they're deploying that application. How far are you into the DevOps movement? Obviously DevOps is a big trend right now around network operations kind of merging together. You know, developers in ops, there's a growing contingent, the cloud market seems to be attracting a lot of developers who want to play with infrastructure and kind of co-develop with that and Facebook, Netflix, Apple, these guys all have those DevOps guys. Where are you guys at with the products there? Do you guys see that on your radar right now the DevOps target audience? Well I think the DevOps audience is someone we care a lot about and in particular our cloud business unit with the public cloud offering that we have where you can develop code on the infrastructure itself if you wish to. We have lots of tools, lots of capabilities. That's a playground basically for developers. So we think we're actually extremely competitive for developers and for companies that want their developers to utilize perhaps an infrastructure that's there, that they don't have to purchase, that they don't have to support, right? They have it and by the way it's very secure. So we actually think we're going to really enable the DevOps movement within the market. Converged infrastructure is a catalyst for DevOps as well. I think we're hearing that a lot. For those that are really pursuing DevOps it's still early days. Yeah, I would agree. Converged infrastructure, I mean it's funny because a lot of people have now, let's see, they say imitation is the best form of flattery. So a lot of people have come out with their own converged infrastructure following what we've done and I have to say even so we have the best offering on the market. It is best of breed in all of the product offerings and from what I can see in our market share position and in our quadrant leadership as well as we have the cloud business unit that's created a wonderful offering that is based on the converged infrastructure. So really utilizes all the really strong features that the converged infrastructure brings. Those proof points are really important because you personally, you and Dave, Don Nutelli did a great job of crafting that strategy and marketing it and getting out to the market but that's one thing to market the concept. Right, another thing to actually have products. Deliver on it. Do that, yeah, it's kind of cool. So congratulations on that, that's good. Thank you very much. Congratulations on all your success. My final question, because we're getting ready to wrap up here for the end of HP Discover. What's next this year for you? What's on your agenda going forward? Obviously, probably the normal, keep the ship going in the right direction but what's on your agenda for the year? Well, in terms of technology, some really key areas of course is software defined networking that's very important to us and we're going to continue to innovate there, no question. The other area is wireless and we have a really strong differentiated offering. Obviously, BYOD is a big movement going on and we have an offering that is a wired wireless integration product set that means that you don't have to manage your wired and wireless infrastructure separately which by the way, all of our competitors, you must do that. So, and we offer security so when you bring any device, doesn't matter what it is, into the network, we can assure that it's the kind of device it is, who's using it and where they're going on the network. We can have access control there and we also characterize the network for those devices so we know we can do device management with our partnership with F5. So, wireless is going to be really important to us, continues to be important to us and then last but not least, I would say, our performance, our continued growth and performance in the data center. We've got some great products that we're going to be rolling out with this year. Our 5900 last year has been very successful for us and you'll see more from us there this year. Some really great stuff. We're seeing meat in the bone, John, across the entire, what used to be ESSN and now is the EN group. This is a trademark of, I know Dave Donatell if you're a trademark of a Donatelli-run organization, identify the stuff that customers need, laser focus on getting them out, put differentiation, put meat in the bone, put pressure on the competition and drive hard. So, it's- It's fun to watch. We've been following you guys for years now. It's been great to watch the success and the real differentiation and have that converged infrastructure, kind of a unique package and totally differentiated and it's great value. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate it. Thank you. As you mayor, it's the HPEGM of the networking group don't forget storage and service all kind of in the same umbrella. Thanks for sharing your perspective and updates. You're welcome. Thanks again, good to see you. Okay, that's it. We'll be right back for a wrap up for here for HP Discover right after this break.